Menchaca said he will reveal next week whether he will allow a planned rezoning of Industry City to proceed after insisting it be delayed for the past six months so he and the community could better grasp and mitigate its purported impacts.

Menchaca’s office distributed an emailed flier last Thursday stating that he will host an event at Sunset Park High School on the evening of Sept. 16. A spokesman from his office confirmed that Menchaca will reveal whether or not he will allow the rezoning to move forward and what concessions he might require.

The green light would only allow the owners of Industry City to begin a public review to rezone the 35-acre, 16-building campus. That process allows the local community board and the borough president to critique the proposal and offer suggestions and then gives the City Planning Commission and the New York City Council the chance to veto it.

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By custom, rezonings hinge on the support of the local council member, giving that official the power to spur modifications to a project. But usually those changes are negotiated near the end of the seven-month review process, not before it.

The spokesman confirmed speculation that Menchaca might seek to include a requirement in the rezoning that a large portion of the 5-million-square-foot campus be preserved for manufacturing and light industry—the traditional uses at the property that in recent years have been supplanted by an influx of creative office tenants. Industry City's owners note that the vast majority of 1950s-era manufacturing jobs vanished long before they took over the Sunset Park property and began reviving it.

“Councilman Menchaca has been clear that it’s very important that the waterfront remain a working waterfront,” the spokesman said. “This is an industrial business zone and there have been concerns that a rezoning could undermine that.”

Menchaca may also ask that Industry City’s owners—a partnership between Jamestown, Belvedere Capital, Angelo Gordon and others—create a vocational school at the property.

Menchaca responded at the time that he would scuttle the rezoning if it were not postponed. Industry City's owners had little choice but to agree.

Menchaca’s spokesman said that in the past six months the councilman has met four times with a working group that included the business advocacy organization, the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corp., Community Board 7 and other organizations and about a dozen times with “other groups and individuals” to discuss their concerns.

On Monday the councilman will reveal his conclusions from the series of meetings, the spokesman said.

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